The loser’s dead, the text read.
How do you know? Asha sat down in her office chair. She’d been about to go across the street to buy her regular chicken wrap for lunch but her growling stomach could wait. There wasn’t any need for her to clarify the identity of the deceased. The only person her mother would refer to with such vitriol was Asha’s estranged father.
My sister in Trinidad went to a wedding last week. She met up with one of his cousins. The lady said he had a massive stroke.
Asha left the conversation hanging. Not because she needed to cry or compose herself. They’d discussed the eventuality of this day many times and Asha knew there was no further information her mother could give her. For almost two decades, the only presence of the man partly responsible for her existence had been the lingering anxiety caused by his eviscerating words and the mildly acidic taste of abandonment at the bottom of her throat.
Of course she had questions. She’d had them since she was fifteen and her father walked out of their apartment door without looking back. Each was a skewer embedded between her ribs that would stab at her during quiet moments, even after she’d proven she didn’t need him or anyone to take care of her.
Did you think about me?
Would you have been proud?
How could you walk out on your kid and leave her to face the world alone?
The chance of having those questions answered now was zero. Or was it?
She went to the staff room to grab a chocolate bar from the vending machine and brought it back to her desk to eat while she searched the internet for an obituary or any information about his life—a masochistic impulse she’d indulged in occasionally since her late twenties. There was never anything of note. He had no digital footprint just like he had no place in her life.
That afternoon there was a hit: A brief notice with few details other than the date of his death and where he’d been buried: Mount Scarlet cemetery in the west end.
She took a bite of the bar and chewed, glimpses of her childhood churning in her thoughts. The memory of a wake her family had attended when she was about seven surfaced. The details of that event had returned to her often throughout her life. Somehow, the shape of her father’s shadow and the memorial had overlapped in her mind to form a Venn diagram. An unlabelled void breathed at its circumscribed center.
Asha couldn’t recall how the woman who had died was related to her. But her father had kept them out past midnight visiting with the dead woman’s immediate family. He’d been charming and gracious with everyone except his exhausted wife and child that evening. When they’d finally returned home at two a.m., her mother paused at the apartment door and spoke in her serious voice.
“When you go inside, walk in backwards,” she instructed Asha.
“Why, mommy?” Asha had asked, rubbing her heavy, sleep-filled eyes.
“Because it stops the dead auntie’s spirit from following us into the house. If you come home after midnight, you have to look any ghost in the eyes to keep them from haunting you.”
Asha did as she was told. Though, she saw no spirit behind her, just her parents in the hall watching her step through the door.
Still, the idea that a ghost could follow them inside frightened her. She accepted it as the truth with the trust of a child who’d been taught to believe in spirits, Santa Claus and curses. It wasn’t long before she filed it away as an old wives tale. She’d dabbled with occult and spiritual practices in her youth for fun like everyone else. The Ouija board pulled out by her friends during a middle school slumber party proved ineffectual. The corners she’d called after watching The Craft with her high-school besties did not imbue her with power.
She’d never attempted to purposefully entice a ghost to stalk her.
Tossing the chocolate wrapper in the trash, she got up and left her office to wash her hands. Theo, the art director at their marketing firm, was loitering in the corridor.
“You coming to Anne’s goodbye party tomorrow night? It’s at Anthony’s.” Theo’s purple dangly earrings glinted.
Asha conceptualized work parties at the local dive bar as vectors of boring contagion. It would be full of small talk and fake insufferable laughter. Tomorrow night, however, the ordeal might prove useful.
“I’m going to take the day off because my father passed away, but I’ll be there. It’ll be a good distraction.” She continued on her way to the restroom.
“Oh?” she heard Theo say behind her. “See you then!”
She was sober and still at Anthony’s at ten p.m. All of her coworkers had left, having toasted Anne’s transfer to the Vancouver office two hours earlier, except for Theo who was on her fourth beer and slurring her words.
“I’ll make sure she gets home safe,” Asha had promised her boss. She got along with Theo better than the others. Her off-beat humor provided some spark in the inane conversation, though Asha’s offer wasn’t unselfish. She needed to get home after midnight and drunk Theo was a convenient excuse.
“Have a beer with me before we call it quits.” Theo’s face was flushed and her black-linered eyes were warm and unfocused.
Asha ordered a stout and surveyed the curly haired woman across from her. “Why do you attend these? The sales people look at you like you’re an alien whenever you speak.”
Theo leaned back in her chair, smiling. “You never know when the cool undercover office weirdo might finally show up. I didn’t think you liked working with Anne that much.”
“I don’t,” she said, sipping from the glass the waitress had deposited in front of her. “I didn’t want to spend the evening at home by myself.”
“That’s right. Sorry about your dad.” Theo leaned forward and began peeling the label off of her beer bottle, making a pile of the shreds in front of her. She didn’t seem capable of sitting still.
Asha shrugged and looked down at her hands. “We weren’t close. I haven’t seen him since I was a teenager.”
“That’s rough.”
“You get used to a person not caring.” Her voice wavered involuntarily. Thankfully, Theo didn’t seem to notice. She took another sip of her beer and steadied herself. “After a while, you only think about them when you’re compelled to.”
Theo looked up at her and angled her head. “I don’t think that’s t-true. I think he might have been on your mind more than you’d like to admit.” She put her hand on Asha’s. It was a clumsy yet comforting gesture.
“Why’s that?”
“You have a sssad face. People aren’t supposed to talk about observations like that at the office or anywhere.” She nodded in agreement with herself. “Can’t share a real jagged-edged broken bottle feeling. Might disrupt productivity and make you care about the person sitting in the cubicle next to you, if you’re brave enough to ask how their sadness came to be.”
Tears gathered in Asha’s eyes. She squinted to hold them back and pulled her hand away. What would she be crying over? A silence. A hole. It wasn’t worth the dehydration.
“We’re just supposed to check in, circle back and follow up, aren’t we?” She cleared her throat and looked at the time on her phone. It was past eleven. “Come on, let’s get you home.” She held out her hand to help Theo up.
Theo took it and stood unsteadily. “Only if you promise to come out to the next normie work get together. You’re the most interesting person in accounts.”
The compliment almost made Asha smile. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
The uber ride to the cemetery was short.
“Sure this is where you want to go?” Her driver asked when he stopped outside the stone archway. The shops in the nearby plaza were closed and the intersection looked desolate. This wasn’t Asha’s safest idea.
“Yes, thanks,” she said as she got out.
She’d never been in a cemetery at night. Why wasn’t there a gate to keep out would-be vandals or damaged women who had questions for their dead fathers? During the day it probably looked like a manicured park instead of a portal to a shadow place where one was likely to be murdered.
A lighted path within led her deep into the grounds. The soft, cool, dark clutched at her skin as she moved. Perhaps she was walking through a crowd of lonely, clinging spirits who wanted to possess her. She swallowed the thought and forced herself to continue.
A left at a winged angel statue and then she stepped onto the grass, using her phone flashlight to guide her. The admin office had emailed her a map of where her father had been buried when she inquired.
Please accept our deepest condolences, was their sympathetic sign-off.
He was exactly where they indicated he would be: a lonely spot, far from the reach of the pathway lights, with no one buried beside or behind him. The stone marker declared only his birth and death dates—no, in loving memory of, dedication, or inspirational quote to brace potential mourners.
She stood in front of his plot and turned off the flashlight. Crickets filled the all-encompassing silence. She shook her head at herself.
“I don’t know why I still expect things,” she said to the ground. It was a childlike, fragile statement, full of vulnerability—nothing like the nonchalant exterior she worked so hard to project.
And that was it, wasn’t it?
Buried beneath his absence, the, “your mother poisoned you against me” accusations, and memories of that strange wake, was five year old Asha—excited for her daddy to take her out for an ice cream on a sunny afternoon; a little girl wholly unaware of the violent disdain incubating between her parents.
She’d never been able to kill that five year old’s happiness in her head.
When she thought she’d lingered long enough, she walked back to the main path and gate.
Kyle, the same Uber driver, picked her up and drove her home. He glanced at her in the rearview mirror a few times with a concerned look on his face. She tried not to make eye contact with him so she wouldn’t have to speak.
“Take care,” he said as she exited in front of her building. She took her time entering the lobby and made sure she didn’t turn to face forward as the elevator closed. It was a much nicer building than her parents could afford when she was little, with a concierge, gym and party room. The elevator even had its own flat screen displaying the weather and road conditions. Stepping out on the fifth floor, she walked to her apartment, listening for a presence behind her. Footsteps? Breathing? Her name whispered in a marrow chilling lament?
Nothing.
At her door, she pressed her head against the frame. At least tomorrow was Saturday and she could sleep in instead of having to drag herself to the office and pretend her client’s sales goals gave her life meaning. She found her keys at the bottom of her purse and exhaled.
The florescent light above her flickered and then dimmed as she turned the lock. Straightening her shoulders, she stopped and looked behind her.
A form stood in the weak light. She spun around and it materialized. An old man with broad lips and a nose similar to hers stood in the center of the hall. She rubbed her eyes, like a child who was up well past her bed time, and the spectre solidified further. Her father, bald and hunched over, was dressed in a baggy black suit and staring at her.
Thin, frail, he was nothing like the compact man she remembered. He must have been chronically ill in the days before his death. Would she have chauffeured him to his medical appointments or helped organize his pills if he’d made the effort to reconcile with her?
“I didn’t think you cared,” she said.
Resentment gathered on his wrinkled brow, while his mouth drooped with the weight of a sour frown. The skewers between her ribs plunged towards her core, deepening the invisible wounds she would have to nurse in the coming days.
Not her safest idea, indeed.
She reached behind her, twisted the knob and pushed the door open, remembering the instructions her mother had given her long ago. Look them in the eyes so they can’t haunt you. Her father held up a trembling hand as if to beg her to wait and listen to his reasoning.
When she hesitated, he began to speak—a bitter slap of a tirade with no reverence for the soft memory of ice cream eaten on a warm summer day.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she said as she crossed over the threshold. The tears she’d held back earlier with Theo sprang from her eyes and streamed down her face. He stopped at the sight of them, his mouth forming an “Oh” around a sudden expression of questioning regret.
She closed her door and left him standing alone in the darkened hallway, without an answer. After she’d locked it, she texted her mother.
At least we know where he is now.
